Long Island University, which established the awards in 1949, says that "Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post will receive the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting."

The award's curator, John Darnton, says in LIU's announcement that the journalists "heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day. Repercussions of the NSA stories in particular will be with us for years to come." Click here to see our coverage of the Snowden leaks, including posts about the reports from the Guardian and Post.

Others who have been awarded Polk awards include:

-- "Shawn Boburg, who covers the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for The Record of Northern New Jersey ... for articles on lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in September that created a monumental traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Boburg, who has written extensively about patronage and cronyism at the Authority for three years, wrote as early as December that the closings may be traceable to powers outside the agency, setting the stage for subsequent stories on the involvement of Gov. Chris Christie's office, which made national headlines."

-- "Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore, Mike Wiser, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada for League of Denial, a Frontline documentary aired on PBS that traced the National Football League's longstanding efforts to quash evidence linking head injuries suffered by players to an inordinately high level of the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy."

-- "Andrea Elliott of The New York Times ... for 'Invisible Child,' her riveting five-part series focusing on one of 22,000 homeless children in New York City."